Show Business: Man with a Valise

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Trintignant's breakthrough came in 1966 with A Man and a Woman. The low-key love story was tailor-made to his personality by his friend, Director Claude Lelouch, and filmed without a script in four weeks. Offers began pouring in, but Trintignant had had enough of romantic parts. "Love scenes embarrass me," he says. "I'm not an exhibitionist." He now prefers political films that share his left-wing viewpoint (the most recent: The Assassination, based on the Ben Barka affair in France) and bad-guy roles "to counteract my own good nature." Costa-Gavras calls him "the only star who'll make films he likes even if those films can ruin his career."

Trintignant uses several devices for cultivating the "inner life" that is the key to his characterizations. To bring out his bad side, he plays poker—"an evil game. If you want to win you have to be vicious." To heighten his perception, he has delved into drugs, fasted and conducted sexual experiments with his wife. To sharpen his powers of concentration, he races his Formula V car. Dominique Sanda, his co-star in The Conformist, describes him as "an eye that listens attentively." Says Trintignant: "I wake up in the morning and think, 'How would my character wash his teeth?' I build up a valise of ideas about him." With that valise, Trintignant never travels light.